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'Once you see what a disease does to the inside of a body, you can work out how to make it better.

'The number of post-mortems has dropped off in recent years. They have huge educational merit for doctors in training. We want them to be good at what they do, we have got to train these people.'

The real-time programme, which has taken six months to organise, will be rescheduled.

Dr Smith said: 'This is not something we have taken lightly. We've done it in a very sensitive and dignified way.

'We have spoken to all the relevant people to make sure it is done properly. There's a lot at stake.'

Adrian Chiles will be joined by broadcaster and consultant Dr Chris Smith alongside the hospital's pathology team as they try to discover a patient's cause of death for the programme called Post Mortem (file picture)

It will not be the first time the autopsy of a human body has been broadcast to the public.

Britain's first public dissection of a human body for 170 years received a mixed reaction when it aired on Channel 4 in 2002.

Professor Gunther von Hagens went ahead with the post-mortem amid the backdrop of public protest and the threat of arrest.

The professor reduced the body of a 72-year-old German man to a heap of organs and a deflated pile of skin before his audience, which appeared largely unmoved by the spectacle.

Afterwards, he pronounced it a 'huge success' but the British Medical Association's Head of Ethics was less impressed, denouncing it as 'degrading and disrespectful'.

A four-part follow-up series called Autopsy: Life and Death later aired on Channel 4 in 2006, in which von Hagens discussed common fatal diseases with the aid of dissections.